There are key differences between B2B product (e.g. software) vs. B2B service (e.g. consultancy) businesses: All these differences impact how to position the brand, what messages to convey to the market, and how to attract potential customers. Obviously, some other factors affect these differences. Like the price point of the offer. But the moral of…
Articles
How Goal Dilution Kills Your Brand’s Believability (And How To Avoid It)
In 1996, two Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized the largest internet search engines were doing it wrong. Yahoo and MSN manually curated sites like a directory. So you could only search for certain things. AltaVista had a slightly more advanced algorithm. It ranked sites depending on how many times your search…
3C Analysis (Customer): How to Make Your Brand Something Customers Want
We’ve talked about the 3C’s that drive a brand’s positioning in our Profit-Led Branding Framework: Company, Competition, and Customer. In this article, we’ll look into the last C: Customer. There are two parts of Customer Analysis. We’ll cover the “What are our customers trying to achieve?” part here. The second part “Who are the customers trying to make…
How The Curse Of Knowledge Ruins Brands’ Value (And How To Avoid It)
In 2007, two MIT students —Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi— created a solution to a modern problem. Laptops and smartphones were becoming more common. And they realized people needed a simple way to access their files from different devices. So they developed an app that allowed users to store their files in the “cloud.” They…
Why Customers Want Freedom *From* Choice (And How You Can Provide It To Sell More)
It’s Friday night. You finally have a chance to relax on your sofa after a long week. You decide to watch a movie with your partner. So you get some snacks and open Netflix to choose a movie to watch. You have a quick look at Netflix’s suggestions. Nothing interesting. So you scroll to the…
The Goal Gap: How The Clash Between Business And Customer Goals Kills Brands (And How To Avoid It)
In 1977, British Rail decided to do something about declining passenger numbers. Their executives couldn’t find a clear reason why results were getting worse. So they blamed marketing and decided to change their advertising agency. And as it’s a huge company, all advertising agencies in the UK competed to get the British Rail account. One…
Narrow Positioning: How Saying No To Some Customers Increases Your Chances of Winning Big
In 1982, programmer John Walker decided to make a big bet. His friend Michael Riddle had a computer-aided design (CAD) program that he struggled to sell. But Walker believed in the idea. Designers who worked on complex projects —like engineers and architects— needed precise measurements. And doing that on paper was painful. You had to…
The Isolation Effect: Why “Isolated” Brands Win (And How To Become One)
In 1892, the Financial Times was struggling. They had started the newspaper a few years ago. And they were competing against other newspapers that covered business and finance news. The shark in the pond was Financial News. But the Financial Times team believed they had better content than them. They didn’t just cover the news.…
3C Analysis (Competition): How To Find Your Unique Positioning In Crowded Markets
We’ve talked about the 3C’s that drive a brand’s positioning in our Profit-Led Branding Framework: Company, Competition, and Customer. In this article, we’ll look into the second C: Competition. Now let’s see how a rental company with seven cars became a global giant, how to find gaps in crowded markets, and how to discover your…
Satisficing: Why Customers Choose The Least Risky Instead Of The Best
In the 1970s, IBM was under attack from all sides. They were the leaders in the business computers market. And IBM System/360 computers were the iPhone of the 60s. But just like any new technology, there was a rush. Competitors were announcing their new breakthrough computers every month. RCA, Digital Equipment Corporation, Xerox… Some were…